Executive Compensation and Firm Financial Performance in China

Executive compensation has long been seen as the solution key to the agency problem between shareholders and managers in terms of corporate governance. Specifically, an efficient remuneration system could effectively motivate executives and reduce agency costs between shareholders and managers. On the other hand, if the remuneration system is not properly designed, it may lead to a lack of incentive for management, which could exacerbate the dispute between shareholders and management in turn. The topic of "exorbitant remuneration" for senior executives of listed companies has caused great concern in China in recent years. Some have begun to question whether the rise in executive remuneration reflects the increase in wealth creation for the company and if the corporate governance incentive scheme is logical and efficient. China is currently undergoing an economic transition to a more market-based economy. Furthermore, Confucianism, which emphasizes the equal distribution of wealth, has had a significant influence on China. Therefore, it is interesting and important to study the relationship between executive compensation and company financial performance in China. Using quantitative analysis, the first finding is that executive compensation and company financial performance are positively correlated. Second, it shows that the pay gap has a positive impact on company performance which supports the tournament theory. For further analysis, the findings indicate that, in highly competitive industries, there would be a greater correlation between executive compensation and company financial performance; in non-SOEs, there would be a larger correlation between executive compensation and company financial performance; after the introduction of the "2015 wage cap," there would be a decreased correlation between executive compensation and company financial performance. Overall, this dissertation provides information on the effects of compensation and pay inequality with a number of practical implications for remuneration committees, policymakers, managers, and media in China and other countries with comparable cultural and institutional backgrounds. However, more research still needs to be done as there exist some limitations to this dissertation

Development of Fatal Intestinal Inflammation in MyD88 Deficient Mice Co-infected with Helminth and Bacterial Enteropathogens

Infections with intestinal helminth and bacterial pathogens, such as enteropathogenic Escherichia coli, continue to be a major global health threat for children. To determine whether and how an intestinal helminth parasite, Heligomosomoides polygyrus, might impact the TLR signaling pathway during the response to a bacterial enteropathogen, MyD88 knockout and wild-type C57BL/6 mice were infected with H. polygyrus, the bacterial enteropathogen Citrobacter rodentium, or both. We found that MyD88 knockout mice co-infected with H. polygyrus and C. rodentium developed more severe intestinal inflammation and elevated mortality compared to the wild-type mice. The enhanced susceptibility to C. rodentium, intestinal injury and mortality of the co-infected MyD88 knockout mice were found to be associated with markedly reduced intestinal phagocyte recruitment, decreased expression of the chemoattractant KC, and a significant increase in bacterial translocation. Moreover, the increase in bacterial infection and disease severity were found to be correlated with a significant downregulation of antimicrobial peptide expression in the intestinal tissue in co-infected MyD88 knockout mice. Our results suggest that the MyD88 signaling pathway plays a critical role for host defense and survival during helminth and enteric bacterial co-infection

An Unified Search and Recommendation Foundation Model for Cold-Start Scenario

In modern commercial search engines and recommendation systems, data from multiple domains is available to jointly train the multi-domain model. Traditional methods train multi-domain models in the multi-task setting, with shared parameters to learn the similarity of multiple tasks, and task-specific parameters to learn the divergence of features, labels, and sample distributions of individual tasks. With the development of large language models, LLM can extract global domain-invariant text features that serve both search and recommendation tasks. We propose a novel framework called S\&R Multi-Domain Foundation, which uses LLM to extract domain invariant features, and Aspect Gating Fusion to merge the ID feature, domain invariant text features and task-specific heterogeneous sparse features to obtain the representations of query and item. Additionally, samples from multiple search and recommendation scenarios are trained jointly with Domain Adaptive Multi-Task module to obtain the multi-domain foundation model. We apply the S\&R Multi-Domain foundation model to cold start scenarios in the pretrain-finetune manner, which achieves better performance than other SOTA transfer learning methods. The S\&R Multi-Domain Foundation model has been successfully deployed in Alipay Mobile Application's online services, such as content query recommendation and service card recommendation, etc.Comment: CIKM 2023,6 page

Austenite-Bainite Transformation Kinetics in Austempered AISI 5160 Steel

This research investigates the process of the formation of bainite in austempered 5160 steel. Steel bar samples were austenitized at 1128 K for 20 minutes followed by holding at various times from 10 seconds to 2 hours and isothermal temperatures from 561K to 728K to obtain a multi-phase matrix. Micro-hardness analysis and metallurgical optical microscopy were used to analyze the experimental results. Hardness results indicated that at the 561K, 589K, and 566K isothermal temperatures for 5160 steel, lower bainite transformation occurred. However, from 644K to 728K, upper bainite transformation was found from the steel. The formation of the bainitic phase in SAE 5160 steel was characterized using thermodynamic and kinetic theories

The response of sea ice and high-salinity shelf water in the Ross Ice Shelf Polynya to cyclonic atmosphere circulations

Coastal polynyas in the Ross Sea are important source regions of high-salinity shelf water (HSSW) - the precursor of Antarctic Bottom Water thatsupplies the lower limb of the thermohaline circulation. Here, the responseof sea ice production and HSSW formation to synoptic-scale and mesoscalecyclones was investigated for the Ross Ice Shelf Polynya (RISP) using acoupled ocean-sea ice-ice shelf model targeted on the Ross Sea. Whensynoptic-scale cyclones prevailed over RISP, sea ice production (SIP)increased rapidly by 20 %-30 % over the entire RISP. During the passage of mesoscale cyclones, SIP increased by about 2 times over the western RISP but decreased over the eastern RISP, resulting respectively from enhancement inthe offshore and onshore winds. HSSW formation mainly occurred in thewestern RISP and was enhanced responding to the SIP increase under bothtypes of cyclones. Promoted HSSW formation could persist for 12-60 h after the decay of the cyclones. The HSSW exports across the DrygalskiTrough and the Glomar Challenger Trough were positively correlated with themeridional wind. Such correlations are mainly controlled by variations ingeostrophic ocean currents that result from sea surface elevation change and density differences.Peer reviewe

Infer Implicit Contexts in Real-time Online-to-Offline Recommendation

Understanding users' context is essential for successful recommendations, especially for Online-to-Offline (O2O) recommendation, such as Yelp, Groupon, and Koubei. Different from traditional recommendation where individual preference is mostly static, O2O recommendation should be dynamic to capture variation of users' purposes across time and location. However, precisely inferring users' real-time contexts information, especially those implicit ones, is extremely difficult, and it is a central challenge for O2O recommendation. In this paper, we propose a new approach, called Mixture Attentional Constrained Denoise AutoEncoder (MACDAE), to infer implicit contexts and consequently, to improve the quality of real-time O2O recommendation. In MACDAE, we first leverage the interaction among users, items, and explicit contexts to infer users' implicit contexts, then combine the learned implicit-context representation into an end-to-end model to make the recommendation. MACDAE works quite well in the real system. We conducted both offline and online evaluations of the proposed approach. Experiments on several real-world datasets (Yelp, Dianping, and Koubei) show our approach could achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, online A/B test suggests a 2.9% increase for click-through rate and 5.6% improvement for conversion rate in real-world traffic. Our model has been deployed in the product of "Guess You Like" recommendation in Koubei.Comment: 9 pages,KDD,KDD201

Detecting RNA modification using direct RNA sequencing: A systematic review.

Post-transcriptional RNA modifications are involved in a range of important cellular processes, including the regulation of gene expression and fine-tuning of the functions of RNA molecules. To decipher the context-specific functions of these post-transcriptional modifications, it is crucial to accurately determine their transcriptomic locations and modification levels under a given cellular condition. With the newly emerged sequencing technology, especially nanopore direct RNA sequencing, different RNA modifications can be detected simultaneously with a single molecular level resolution. Here we provide a systematic review of 15 published RNA modification prediction tools based on direct RNA sequencing data, including their computational models, input-output formats, supported modification types, and reported performances. Finally, we also discussed the potential challenges and future improvements of nanopore sequencing-based methods for RNA modification detection

Coal mining environment causes adverse effects on workers

BackgroundThe objective of this study is to study the adverse effects of coal mining environment on workers to discover early effective biomarkers.MethodsThe molecular epidemiological study was conducted with 502 in-service workers, who were divided into miner and auxiliary. We measured the individual levels of dust exposure for participants. Clinical examinations were conducted by qualified doctors. Peripheral blood was collected to measure biochemistry, hemogram, and karyocyte apoptosis.ResultsAll workers were healthy who have not found with any diseases that can be diagnosed medically in the physical examination and showed no difference in dust exposure level, age, height, weight, and body mass index between groups. The working years of miners were lower than that of auxiliaries (p < 0.001). Compared with auxiliaries, the concentration and percentage of lymphocytes (p = 0.040, p = 0.012), basophils (p = 0.027, p = 0.034), and red blood cells (p < 0.001) and the concentration of hemoglobin of miners were lower (p < 0.001). The percentage of neutrophils (p = 0.003), the concentration of mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (p = 0.002), and the proportion of karyocyte apoptosis in miners were higher (p < 0.001). Miners presented higher blood urea nitrogen (p < 0.001), ratio of blood urea nitrogen to creatinine (p < 0.001), the high density lipoprotein cholesterol (p < 0.001), lower creatinine (p < 0.05), and cholesterol (p < 0.001).ConclusionThe coal mining environment impacted mining workers’ immune function, renal function, and the hematopoietic system, including BUN/CRE, HGB, RBC, and LYMPH, which could be used as early biomarkers to screen the health of coal miners